RemNote

RemNote is a web-based Note-writing system with a structured knowledge model and first-class operations for adapting notes into a Spaced repetition memory system, a la The mnemonic medium can be extended to one’s personal notes.

Prior to a significant redesign in September 2021, it had a somewhat oppressively formal knowledge model, but I think the design’s new approach is pretty successful. It’s an outliner in which every node may contain flashcards. To create a flashcard, you either surround text with double-curly-brackets (a la Anki’s cloze deletion syntax), or insert >>, <<, <>, etc to make a forward, reverse, or double-sided flashcard.

You can make multi-line flashcards by using the outliner’s hierarchical structure. If the parent ends with a flashcard symbol (e.g. >>), the children are rendered as the “back.” This is a graceful way to repurpose existing primitives to achieve enhanced flexibility.

It still retains notions of “concepts” and “descriptors,” which are elements of the original knowledge model, but it seems these may be deprecated at this point.

It has some Transclusion features (“portals”), so that concept hierarchies can be composed into different “documents.” Like Roam Research, the model encodes the belief that text blocks, structured in this model, can be made into reusable units. I’m worried about their composability: Transclusion is limited by the data model’s composability.

Original author: {Martin Schnieder}

Design-focused co-founder joined in 2021: {Moritz Wallawitsch}

They raised a $2.8M seed round in summer 2021.

Roam Research

Interesting workflows

• https://twitter.com/ARossP/status/1399872763335254017?s=20
  • Step 1: Go through my outline and identify issues I’d like my intern to help with. I create a new block where the question falls in the outline, preface it with Intern Research, and then type out the question I’m looking for an answer to.
  • Step 2: Create a new page titled “Intern Research: Intern Name” and share it my intern. I then look through the Intern Research references for questions to assign, and add them to the intern’s page as block references.
  • Step 3: The intern or RA reports findings, citations, etc., embedded under that the question block references. So all their work is happening in their assigned and shared page.
  • Step 4: Because their page contains block reference back to the questions in my outline, their findings automatically appear inline in my outline, right where they’re needed, as expandable block references.
  • I can think of questions I’d like research help on as I’m drafting the outline, writing them wherever needed in that outline, then easily assign them later, and have the finished research appear exactly where I need it, when I need it, for evaluation, follow-up, and application.
• Backlinks can be used to implicitly define nodes in knowledge management systems